Archaic Period

The term, archaic, generally implies something that is no longer current or applicable.

The Archaic Period of ancient Greece was roughly from 1100 BCE until the sack of Athens by the Persians in 480 BCE and denotes the artistic and literary style which preceded the Classical Age.

The term archaic comes from the Greek word arkhaikos which literally means old fashioned, antiquated or primitive but most critics do not use the term in a negative sense, they simply use the word to denote an older but not necessarily inferior style.

Many different authors and historians have chosen different dates for the beginning of the Archaic Period but, generally speaking, we may push the dawn of archaic styles all the way back to the Bronze Age (3000-1200 BCE) and the foundations of Greek culture.

Our conception of archaic Greece cannot be easily defined because poets and artists surely saw the world in the same way in which we see it but they simply chose to represent it in a manner that was both unrealistic and simplistic; statues in profile and poems with highly embellished characters were not true representations of the subjects they depicted but they were sufficient to express the intent of the artists and the themes they wished to convey.

The sack of Athens in 480 BCE was a devastating event but, from the ashes of the ruined city, a new vitality emerged that changed the way the Greeks viewed themselves and the manner in which they chose to reflect their world in art and literature; the sack of Athens is a convenient place in history to mark the end of the Archaic Period and the beginning of what we call the Classical Age; as in all classifications, the transition from one style, or age, into another cannot be pinpointed to a clearly defined moment or event but, for the sake of discussion, the Archaic Period can be said to have perished in the flames of the Akropolis (Acropolis) and risen, like the phoinix (phoenix), as the next evolutionary step of a process that had no beginning and whose ending can only be realized in the imagination of generations yet to come.

Of the many books on the subject of archaic Greece, I personally recommend The Art and Culture of Early Greece, 1100-480 B.C. by Jeffery M. Hurwit (ISBN 080149401X); if you cannot find this book at your library, you can order it through the Book Shop on this site which is linked to Amazon.com.